Andrew Lacy 00:00
A lot of quite serious diseases that we're catching at the company will catch them so early that sort of the intervention is much more at the change the oil sort of level of complexity than it is sort of put a new engine in.

Claudia von Boeselager 00:13
Are you ready to boost your longevity and unlock peak performance? Welcome to The Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast I'm your host, Claudia von Boeselager, longevity and peak performance coach. Each week we'll explore groundbreaking science, unravel longevity secrets share strategies to grow younger and stay up to date with world-class health and peak performance pioneers. Everything you need to live longer, live better, and reach your fullest potential ready to defy aging, optimize health, and promote peak performance; visit LLinsider.com. For more. Today's guest is Andrew Lacy, the founder and CEO of Prenuvo, a transformative healthcare company growing fast across North America pre new core innovation is a one-hour advanced medical screening using MRI that can detect solid cancer at stage one and 500 other medical conditions. Prior to Prenuvo, Andrew has extensive experience taking digital products from conception to launch in both his own startups and large corporates like Disney Libera and various large banks and insurance companies. Andrew's education includes an MBA from Stanford University, a JD in law, and a bachelor of economics from the University of Melbourne, Australia. And Andrew, for you to your audience, has kindly offered to have $300 off your comprehensive exam. So just check out the show notes for the coat. Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. Andrew, I'm really excited to have you on today.

Andrew Lacy 01:51
Thanks, Cody. I'm really excited to be here. That's quite an introduction for me. I've not heard that before. extensively.

Claudia von Boeselager 01:56
Yes. And you've done many different things as I have as well, which is always great. What led you to Prenuvo, and what you're doing there? And why is a full body MRI scan for preventative health and early disease detection? Your passion now?

Andrew Lacy 02:14
Well, I think it's funny. I would say one of my characteristics that you might be able to glean from my work background is I have a very curious mind. So I like to work on a lot of different things, spanning boundaries, from law to medicine to business. And I think probably I'm hopeful to some extent that that's part of the secret of longevity is to keep your mind very active. My 40s Not very long ago, and, uh, you know, I was an entrepreneur that worked quite hard, carried a decent amount of probably low-level stress. And I started to look in the mirror and ask myself the question, you know, am I okay, is all this effort that I'm putting into my life going to pay off one way or the other in making the world a better place? Or, you know, making a better future for myself? And I didn't have an answer to that question. So I went out and tried to learn what I could, and I did colonoscopies and genetic tests, and Horvath clock, diagnostics, and all these things that gave me these little point answers. They told me something, but there was nothing that told me a real comprehensive answer. I ran into the founding radiologist to maneuver around this time, and I went in and did a scan. And I learned more about my health in that scan than the medical system had told me my entire life. And I really just felt like I had this visceral feeling that an entrepreneur sometimes gets, like you see the future. And it became my mission thereafter to find ways to bring this technology to as many people as possible around the world.

Claudia von Boeselager 03:50
So beautiful. And what does that journey look like? How are you expanding it? What's the vision there?

Andrew Lacy 03:56
So we've gone from one clinic in Vancouver, Canada, three years ago to now we are in nine locations around North America. All locations this year were actively looking right now in Europe and the Middle East, and Asia. So we're really working pretty hard to scale the business horizontally while, at the same time, kind of getting deeper and deeper into what we can learn from the scans that we're taking.

Claudia von Boeselager 04:23
Very cool. What are some of the diseases Andrew, you can detect early using a preventative full body MRI scan,

Andrew Lacy 04:31
so an MRI for your listeners that may not sort of be familiar with these different modalities? It really is it excels at investigating soft tissue in the body. So you can think of soft tissue as being all of our organs. And MRI images the body it's actually imaging hydrogen, and hydrogen is attached to water to fat to muscle, and by altering the frequency with which we image you, we can start to build sort of a histological picture of For every little three-dimensional pixel in your body, and start to really understand what is that composed of, Is it blood? Is it fluid? Is it proteinaceous tissue, and that can tell us a lot about the underlying disease process that we're able to diagnose? And each of the different organs. It's the scan itself is particularly good at looking for solid tumors. And the main reason for that is there's one sequence we use that's called diffusion. And diffusion really just looks for hotspots in the body, and for any woman that is told that they should feel their lumps to fill their breasts for lumps. We know this works because while not every lump is cancer, every cancer is a lump. And the same is true inside the rest of your body. And with this machine, we're able to do that digitally, obviously, at a much greater sensitivity than you could with your own hands.

Claudia von Boeselager 05:50
So for some people thinking, you know, will I've had an MRI on my knee, do I need a full body scan? What's the point of actually doing the full body? Because I think traditionally people would have thought, you know, it's just for maybe my shoulder or just for one part of the body. So why the full body scan? Why is that important? Well, to

Andrew Lacy 06:10
start with, it's a lot more if you know what you're doing is full of faster than imaging every part of your body individually. In their previous scan, we do, we image at clinical diagnostic quality equivalent of 22 different parts of the body. And in a regular hospital facility, that might take 20 to 30 minutes for every one of those parts. So really doing it in one go enables the scan because no one wants to sit in MRI machines 20 Different times over many hours to collect the same information. But then, more fundamental is the idea that our bodies are not sort of a collection of parts; our body is a dynamic system. And we can just learn a lot more about how our underlying physiology is responding to our lifestyles by looking at the entire body in one go.

Claudia von Boeselager 07:00
Can you talk about some client breakthroughs? Let's say there are people that might have come in and said, You know, I just want to do a checkup, or what have been some impactful insights that clients have had? Well, for

Andrew Lacy 07:13
us, it's been a real journey because, if I'm being totally honest, we thought this game was amazing. And let's work hard to get it to as many places as possible. And we understood that AI would be an important part of that. And we're doing a lot of research in the field of AI to see if we can develop models that can diagnose disease. But in the process of doing a lot of this research, actually, we had to first start to understand where all the organs are in our bodies; they're all this squishy and in different sizes and your body than they are in mind. And we had to build a lot of fundamental technologies just to sort of understand where things are and how big they are, and the volume of organs or fat or muscle or things like this. And, in the process of doing this, we started to get very excited about the ability of these scans to not only obviously diagnose the disease early and therefore affect longevity, but at the same time, tell us an awful amount of information about our bodies that can really help us alter the way that we live our lives so that we can have much better healthspan during our lives.

Claudia von Boeselager 08:21
Can you give a few examples? Sure. I

Andrew Lacy 08:23
mean, I'll give an example that came up even yesterday, and this is very anecdotal. But it's one of the things that I think as we collect more and more data, we may, in fact, be sort of furthering the field of science. We started to observe, actually, in a couple of patients that had smaller than average calf muscles, they also tended to have smaller than average brain volumes. And, you know, and the theory goes that that could mediate that decline is a vascular problem. And that is that it's an end, it's an end result, it's the tissue being damaged because there's not enough blood supply going to the brain. And in particular is not enough blood supply going to the part of the brain where Alzheimer's tends to start, which is the hippocampal region. You're you have to also have a good cardiovascular system as you age to be able to pump a good supply of blood to your lower limbs. And so we're starting to see, you know, there's the potential that this may be a biomarker for, you know, for brain volume, and that's one of the exciting things. There are just so many this, there are so many interesting biomarkers yet to be uncovered that can really help us learn more about, again, how the way we're living our life affects the underlying health. What are

Claudia von Boeselager 09:42
some of the other biomarkers that you look at and are able to ascertain from the scan? So you mentioned cancer? I think super interesting. The correlation between calf volume and brain size. I think that's phenomenal. We've had a few brain specialists.

Andrew Lacy 09:59
Studies in mice are anecdotal at this point. But it's we're very interested now that we look a lot at fat in the body. So we carry fat, obviously subcutaneously. This is the sort of ugly fat we carry, carry fat, viscerally, viscerally. So this is the fat that surrounds the organs. And if you had to choose which fat to have, you would want subcutaneous fat, even though it may look less appealing than visceral fat, because visceral fat is much more highly correlated with heart attack risk or pericardial. Fat. So the fat around the heart is much more highly correlated with cardiovascular disease, or fat in the liver is very highly correlated with metabolic disorders like diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. So just even knowing what your fat composition is and where the fat is in the body, everyone has some; unfortunately, you know, where is it? Where is it highlighted? You know, it can be really useful information for someone who wants to, in between scans, work on improving their underlying health.

Claudia von Boeselager 11:04
So what would be a typical use case? Who is the client that can come to you? And what would that protocol look like between understanding of what they need to do? What are the preparation times after the scan what is then some recommendations or protocols that you help find a walkthrough

Andrew Lacy 11:22
at the moment, everyone more or less gets the same scan, so we don't get customized too much for the individual tool other than we have three different scans, and people can go on the website and sort of review those. We have three types of people that come in. Actually, there's the first category are people you might expect; these are the AVID subscribers to many different longevity blogs, who are generally quite healthy and fit, but they really want to stay in front of their health because they want to, you know, live like that at 20-year-old in well into their hundreds. And that's one group of people; I see you putting your hand out. The second are people that have a much higher risk for whatever reason; they might have a family member that had cancer and passed away or a parent that had a burst aneurysm and passed away. And for them, they're using us as a screening tool. But it feels much less discretionary, like not knowing what's going on with the health is really affecting that peace of mind. And as we know, the connection between mind and body, if people are not comfortable in their skin, that's going to affect their underlying health. And then the last category is people that might have some indeterminant symptoms, and the medical system hasn't really helped provide them with some clarity about what's going on. We have a health system that is really good at diagnosing acute problems. So you know, if you go skiing and you break your arm, the Mako systems, gonna tell you that you have a broken arm. But if you have, you know, infrequent headaches or unexplained weight gains or losses, or every so often pain in your abdomen that you don't quite know what it is that makes us immune is pretty slow to actually diagnose, and people come to us in some ways to get some clarity faster. So that if there is something going on, they can really start working on making themselves healthier a lot quicker.

Claudia von Boeselager 13:14
Do you also do blood tests around that? Do you like a full, holistic view? Or is it purely different scans?

Andrew Lacy 13:22
At the moment, we're just doing the screening, I highly recommend that people also get regular blood tests. I also recommend that people, especially when they get into their 40s, Do at least maybe one calcium score of their heart just to make sure that they don't have a genetic predisposition to calcification. But to be really good at what we do to be well classed at Whole body screening, really understanding such a deep requires such a deep knowledge of the hardware and the software acquisition protocols. And increasingly, the AI that we've decided that that's where we really want to focus our energy and attention at this point in time.

Claudia von Boeselager 14:01
Exciting is preventative MRI screening is safe for everyone. Are there any cases where you would say, you know, it's not a suitable candidate,

Andrew Lacy 14:11
this is largely safe, there are a small number of people who are not able to do an MRI. So these might be folks that have a pacemaker installed. There are certain implants that you might have in your spine or your brain that can be problematic. But for 99% of people, the scan is indicated and appropriate for them if they wish to use it to get screened for their health. The process itself is very interesting and different. So when a patient comes into our facility, it's a much different experience to what you would expect from a hospital or an imaging clinic. There are no white walls. It's very warm and inviting and calm, and it feels like a bit of a spa. The machines themselves are very open, you spend a decent amount of time with your head outside of the machine for people that might have found MRIs claustrophobic in the past. And then, finally, we have streaming television inside the machine itself. So, the most often complaint we get these days is that they haven't finished whatever episode they are watching by the time the scan is done, which is very different from what you might expect in a sort of diagnostic hospital setting when you go and get an MRI.

Claudia von Boeselager 15:27
Yeah, I read a few complaints. Ahead of our interview, I was talking to a few people; they were like, oh, that tunnel is so scary, I don't want to go into it. So for people who've never had an MRI, traditionally, you need to be you on a little sort of moveable bed, if you will, that goes into a tunnel. And it can be very noisy. Some places offer music or something as well. But television is always a good distraction as well. And what about people who maybe suffer from health anxiety and don't want to know? Or they're like, you know, why should I get a scan? What do you recommend for people who are in that sort of category of health anxiety, trying not to know about things? Why should they still pay attention to this?

Andrew Lacy 16:10
They're really great questions. And it's sort of how I want to have a very declarative answer. Because, you know, if you're not one of those people, it's often hard to understand what it'd be like to be in the shoes. I mean, this is a clinical diagnostic scan. So everyone learns something about their health. More often than not, those things are very early and can be treated, if you know, and I use the word treated instead of metallics because oftentimes the interventions that you need to do changes to lifestyle, not interfacing with the medical system. For people that really are nervous about this, I guess the philosophical question I would ask people to reflect on is this idea that the reason why getting diagnosed with a disease is scary has much less to do with us than it does with the medical system. Because we live with a system that diagnoses disease at such an advanced stage ordinarily, that that word itself, the disease is sort of associated with, you know, life-threatening, expensive, low probability of success, scary. And I would love, as we grow this company, to really challenge that definition of disease; why does it have to be such a scary thing? Why can we start thinking about, as you know, early, nonmedical, high probability success, informative, rather than scary, and so on? And so that's what we're sort of working towards as a company beyond just building the business is changing, in some ways, the definition that people have with medical conditions, and make it what they are maybe like when you go and get your car serviced. And they tell you, you know, you need to change the oil, that you know, you don't, that's not a disastrous, horrible event. It's just something that you have to do. And I think a lot of a lot of quite serious diseases that we're catching at the company will catch them so early, that sort of the intervention is much more at the change the oil sort of level of complexity than it is sort of put a new engine in.

Claudia von Boeselager 18:20
Yeah, I mean, for those listening and watching who's been following for longer, what you hear time and again from all the different scientists and doctors and everyone I have on prevention is better than cure. Right. So I think it's getting in there early. And this is a great modality to actually understand if there is something that comes up as well. I had a friend who did one of these scans. And they also detected like early cancer that was able to be treated, and you know, she's completely fine. But I think that a bit more if you will, old school method of denial. I think sort of my parent's generation of, like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then it's like stage four cancer, you know, it's like there is an in-between place. And I think with technology, with lifestyle interventions when caught early enough, including for dementia, dementia, and Alzheimer's. That's the beauty of nowadays that we can actually reverse so much if caught on time. So it's great to have modalities like MRI scans to do it with Prenuvo as well.

Andrew Lacy 19:21
Not just that, but that's even an example. I mean, this is oftentimes the first time someone looks inside their body. So we all wake up in the morning, we go to the bathroom, we look in the mirror, we know where every imperfection is on our skin, we know where every mole is we have, but we have no idea what's going you know what's under the skin. And we're all unique human beings and, and, you know, there's a lot of interesting insight there, and not even necessarily medical conditions, but I saw a lot of really helpful to know as we work to optimize our life. I'll give you an example. About 0.6% of patients can have what's called a horseshoe kidney. What is a horseshoe kidney? A horseshoe when we are, when we're when we are a fetus, we actually start with one organ. And then as the fetus develops in the womb, there's so that that that one organ splits into and becomes two kidneys. And in around somewhere between one and 200 to one and 300 people, that doesn't split. And so we don't; you only end up with one really big kidney that sort of looks like a seven AB if you happen to be particularly fit. And for people that have this condition, they have a high risk of infection, and they have a slightly higher risk of kidney cancer, I believe. And so this is something that's really interesting to know, we often while we stay on the subject of kidneys too often see, every so often we'll see someone who might have had a very active time as a youngster, they might have done karate, or I don't know, Kickboxing or something like this. And at some point, they got injured, and one of the kidneys actually died. And they didn't know about it, and the other kidney grew to twice the size. Because at that age, our bodies are still developing. And they had perfectly normal kidney function, but they only had one kidney. So there had to be that, you know, it's interesting to know, in order to be aware that you only have one, you don't have the same level of redundancy that other folks might have, and to pay a little bit more attention. So these are not medical conditions. But these are all things that make us unique. And so I think it helpful to know if you want to really optimize your health,

Claudia von Boeselager 21:27
and what about lung conditions or even the gut? Are there things that you are able to pick up on?

Andrew Lacy 21:33
Yeah, sure. Well, let's start with the gut. So recall, I said we had this special sequence that feels for hardness in the body. So tumors, most tumors are hard. That's why that sequence is particularly good for looking for cancer. But that's not the only thing that's hot in the body. And then if you've ever had an infected finger, or something infected on the outside of the body, and if you sort of feel it, it feels harder than the surrounding tissue. So that inflammation actually causes this hardness. And so anywhere we see inflammatory conditions in the body, we can also, you know, we can see that relatively easy with, with the MRI technology. So for patients that might have colitis, so this is a chronic inflammation of the colon, we'll be able to see that relatively easily with these scans. And what's really interesting about that condition, in particular, is that they can develop so slowly, over the course of decades, that it's pretty much impossible as individuals to be able to identify the underlying disease that's progressing. Because from one day to the next, really, nothing has changed. But if you couldn't compare yourself today versus you 20 years ago, you might have noticed a problem with your or a difference in your bowel function or something like this. So, these conditions are really hard to identify as individuals, but they're quite easy. Using this technology.

Claudia von Boeselager 22:56
Did you envisage that the scan could replace the colonoscopy at some point,

Andrew Lacy 23:01
generally not. We don't advise that. And the main reason is anything that you can look at with your own eyes, or a physician or specialists can look at with their own eyes, is always going to be a better modality. So that's why we will detect melanoma with our scans. But we don't want to, I mean because a dermatologist would detect that way earlier. with colon cancer, we will detect colon cancer once it starts constricting the colon wall, so still localized, but we wanted to see the polyps that are the pre-cancer. And, of course, when you do a colonoscopy, they don't just check for cancer, but they also remove those precancerous polyps. And obviously, we can't do that digitally with an MRI. So we don't recommend it replaces colonoscopy, we also at this stage don't recommend that we that the scans replace mammograms; they're very complementary to mammograms. But other than that, anything else you can see with your own eyes? It's particularly if you're symptomatic. There are typically other tests that can be more appropriate.

Claudia von Boeselager 24:02
Okay, but no, I meant more at some stage in the future with the development of technology. But obviously, that's a big feature. It's possible.

Andrew Lacy 24:09
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's possible, I still mean, at the risk of oversharing, I still get a colonoscopy. So I think there's a very valuable screening modality. And at the same time, sometimes colonoscopies can't visualize the entire bow. Whereas obviously, you can with MRI, and we have found cancer in parts of the bow that were inaccessible to scopes in some patients, so that's the possibility. Again, the technology is being complementary rather than substitutes

Claudia von Boeselager 24:46
for people in that peak performance health optimization state, how can using a full MRI scan help to unlock peak performance?

Andrew Lacy 24:56
Well, here we start talking a little bit about the future. So we're doing a lot have active research in. We like to think of it as sort of building quantifiable biomarkers of our health. What do I mean by this is that when you come in for a scan today, we establish a baseline of your health. And here we were able increasingly to measure the volumes of all of your organs, the volumes of every one of your muscle groups, the volumes of, you know, the clearance of every joint in your body, this the curve angle of every vertebra in your spine, we do a detailed brain volumetric. Now, most of these are a little bit under the hood right now as it relates to consumers. Because as we go through this research, we'll be going through an FDA process as well. But what's really nice is that people are coming today; we're collecting this evidence already so that when they come in, subsequently, we're able to help them understand the trajectory of their health as it relates to different organs or systems of the body. And the hope here is that, first of all, that feedback will help us live better lives. A picture is worth 1000 words. So you know, we we've had people that have come in that were smokers, and it doesn't matter how many packets of cigarettes with horrible pictures of lungs that they buy at the supermarket. It's somehow different when you see pictures of your own lungs. And so seeing these pictures of your body is, I think, really, really insightful. In Silicon Valley, where we opened a location two years ago, we have been imagining a lot of quite young people. And we're identifying a lot of MSK problems. So these people are having problems, typically in their cervical spine. They're usually asymptomatic and usually quite young. And if we showed that spine to a radiologist and asked them to guess the age of that person, oftentimes, they would probably guess that that person was 15 years older than they actually are. So just being able to see and show someone a picture of their spine and show them the little disc bulges that are starting to develop helps them understand the way they live their life in their 30s. And the 40s is going to affect their mobility, most likely in the 60s and 70s. And why is that important? Because mobility is one of the most critical maintaining mobility later in life, of the most critical things for actually living a long life. As soon as you lose the mobility, you tend to pass away. So it's kind of crazy to think that there are things you can do when you're in your 30s that can really affect whether you're going to live to 80 or 100. And knowing about this, it's just so critically important to making those lifestyle modifications

Claudia von Boeselager 27:34
really, really fundamental, and catching them early as well. I mean, even you know Dr. Dale Bredesen of the Buck Institute, a neuroscientist who has a protocol to reverse Alzheimer's and a lot of neurodegenerative diseases, he says that you know, these diseases are 20 years in the making. So if caught on time, right, and caught early are preventable, right? So that's the beauty of it as well. So you know, working hand in hand with things like these MRI scans is really beautiful.

Andrew Lacy 28:01
The only unfortunate caveat is that a lot of the interventions tend to be the things that we already a little bit no good for us, which is, you know, eating healthy exercise. You know, don't sit in front of the computer for too long. These sorts of things. But again, sometimes, really seeing being able to see the picture is the visceral moment that encourages a lifestyle change.

Claudia von Boeselager 28:23
Yeah. Or to see what the trajectory could be like if nothing is done. Yeah, not everyone has the moments, but some do.

Andrew Lacy 28:31
And for us, because we image so many people that are, quote, unquote, normal. So in our medical system, you are normal until you have an advanced disease. So we're imaging all these people that have not been diagnosed with something, and we're seeing various states varying states of degree disease progression. And so, you know, being able to actually diagnose these conditions a lot earlier really can sort of help our understanding of disease and what we can do about it, to give an example of the brain. So we've now image so many people, so many normal brains, that we've been able to construct a curve of what normal looks like. So we can basically take any skull and look at the brain inside the skull, you know, normalize it for the size of the head, and we understand or begin to understand now, what does that curve of brain volume loss look like? That is normal, and what would be an abnormal amount of brain volume loss? Because as we age, probably some of the interventions that you will follow in yourself, you know, for the average person, they lose a certain amount of brain volume every decade. And the question you would like to know as an individual is how is my brain volume comparing or my brain volume loss? If Is there any comparison to the average? Am I doing better? Or am I doing worse than the average? And over time, I think we're gonna be able to answer that question not just for the brain but for all organs in the body.

Claudia von Boeselager 29:54
That's super exciting. And then obviously look at protocols on how to reverse it right and improve it. Um, do you make specific recommendations? Or do you say, you know, these your results or what we're seeing speak to your medical professional about it? Or what are your recommendations?

Andrew Lacy 30:10
Here, it's kind of nice to come from not the medical world to some extent because my focus really was on building the service that I would like to have as a patient. And traditional radiology often leaves the recommendation-making to the primary care physician. And the problem with that is that we, as radiologists, see so many more conditions more frequently than a primary care provider does that the radiologists are much more able to understand what should be the next course of action. So after inuvo, what we do is we not only tell you what we see or don't see, but if we see something, see something, we characterize it to the best of our abilities, and we provide what we believe will be an appropriate next step. And that's useful for the patients so that they can then go and interface with the medical system from the point of view of having knowledge. So you might have heard this expression, you know, be the CEO of your own health or, you know, be your own best health advocates. So the goal is really to enable patients to do that. But then also, frankly, physicians, and we work with hundreds of physicians, find it super helpful for them because, you know, it avoids them having to then go and figure out what should be the next step. You know, and particularly for some rare conditions that they may not see very frequently. That's exciting.

Claudia von Boeselager 31:31
So you mentioned some developments with AI scanning. What are the plans for the future? Do you foresee and plan to help people prevent disease and increased longevity?

Andrew Lacy 31:44
Yeah, I think the real promise of AI, and this is where we're doing a lot of active research, is in being able to identify trends and biomarkers that radiologists otherwise can't see. So I think a lot of people are focused on AI replacing radiologists. And I don't know if that will happen. But I think what's even more exciting is using AI to potentially sort of distill instant insight from this volume of data that a radiologist could never do that, for us, I think, is probably some of the most exciting research that we're doing as the company we just published, or presented, I believe, close to 20 papers in the last six months, just looking at the brain, and what aspects of lifestyle in particular, were correlated with different, you know, increases or decreases with a brain volume. And a lot of this was very insightful. And again, this is part of the advantage of being able to apply these very, very detailed volumetric models on brains that are, again, quote, unquote, normal in the eyes of the medical profession, we can really start to learn a lot. And that's where I think we'll be, we'll be investing a lot of time as a company.

Claudia von Boeselager 32:52
That's really exciting. And if you could live to 150 years old, with excellent health, how would you spend it,

Andrew Lacy 33:01
I would probably just, in some ways, continue to do what I'm doing, which is, to have a curious mind, move from one sector to the next, and identify cool, interesting problems that the world needs to be solved. And, you know, work hard to see if we can sort of build a better future for the people that come after us. To be honest,

Claudia von Boeselager 33:24
what excites you most about the future of health, well-being, in longevity in the coming years in a more general sense?

Andrew Lacy 33:31
Well, I think coming out of COVID, to be perfectly honest, I think there are two important trends that are worth pointing out. The first one is people came out of this period with a renewed interest in preventive health, we noticed that people that had a hard time dealing with COVID had comorbidities, and many of those comorbidities were things they didn't even know about before they got COVID. And so I think people are a lot more interested and excited to understand what's going on underneath the skin that I may not know about, that I can do something about today. So we saw that even, I believe, probably three or four months into COVID, we had the same, you know, we were growing our business, you know, from the time right before COVID. So aside from a very small blip, I think there's been such a renewed interest and excitement in preventive health. And that's really exciting for this space. Because as humans, we can tend to procrastinate and not necessarily want to sort of go looking for things that we may not otherwise feel a need to look for. The second thing interesting trend, unfortunately, is I think a lot of people started to understand that the medical system doesn't do a good job of preventive health and that we have a very reactive medical system. You know, and that if we want to live long, healthy lives, we sort of have to take that into our own hands to something didn't; I hope that's not where the medical system evolves; I hope it evolves towards preventative care and away from reactive medicine. But I think people realize that we only have one life to live. And it's sort of, we have a responsibility to ourselves to really sort of take control and really take ownership and responsibility for maintaining ourselves in good health. And I think in light of this, you're seeing not just Geneva, but many other companies that have sort of started up to look at, you know, preventative, mental health or, you know, wearables to track sleep patterns and things like this. So, I think there's just a lot of interest. And there are a lot of new and exciting companies that are starting to really have an impact in this preventive health space. And I think that's pretty exciting. It's a great place to be.

Claudia von Boeselager 35:50
I totally agree. And yeah, have you made any particular changes for preventative health for yourself? Over the last years, like, what are some of your new protocols,

Andrew Lacy 36:02
so I get emails myself every six months or so. Usually, I'm a guinea pig when they're, you know, in a new clinic or when they want to experiment with something. I noticed I went and raised money for this business about a year and a half ago. And I imagined my spine throughout the process. And I was I saw my spine, my cervical spine go from a normal curvature to pathological straightening simply because of the stress that was involved at the time of doing this fundraising. So for me, it was like such a reminder that, you know, can you imagine if, if one's life was sort of defined by chronic stress, just the impact that could have on the body. And I could see it in my own scans. And so I went out and bought a treadmill desk. And now, when I work out of my home office, I usually walk something like a half marathon. While I have noticed that my posture is a lot better, I've noticed. And I've been able to look at my scans and see that straightening reverse back to a nice normal curvature. And for me, it was proof that, you know, these interventions can work. And I think as we study more and more, we're going to learn, in fact, that a lot more things that we thought were potentially not reversible may well be able to be reversed. If we can identify them early enough. I think, you know, Dell, Dale's research into dementia being a really great example that we thought that that was something that, you know, couldn't be reversed. But if you can identify it early enough, there are actually things that you can do. So that was my big aha moment like holy cow, you know, look at my spine. That's when I start to see the bulges. Now, you know, I want to stop this right away. And and that was the best investment I made actually

Claudia von Boeselager 37:46
very cool. For listeners interested in understanding for Novo and longevity better, what online resources would you recommend they start with?

Andrew Lacy 37:56
Well, it's a bit of a minefield, if I'm being totally honest, people have tried to do screening for a long time. And 20 years ago, they started doing screening with CT machines. So CT is a spinning X-ray; it's great for bone, but it's not great for soft tissue. And so it resulted in a lot of false negatives, and also a lot of false positives, which doctors universally hated. And then, in the last 10 or so years, people have been trying to do this with MRI. But because MRI is very slow or narrow, they only are ever able to take kind of fuzzy pictures, shall we say. And those fuzzy pictures mean that you end up having a lot of false positives. So for people that want to do that research, unfortunately, it's kind of hard because you really have to understand what makes for a great protocol. And you have to understand why, you know, to some extent, why hardware, like what we've built and customized for whole body screening, is fundamentally different from the highway that you see in a regular imaging clinic. And why the sequences that we have customized over the last 10 years are finally different to what you get off the shelf from any manufacturer. And unfortunately, a lot of doctors don't understand that difference. And so it's really hard to assume, in fact, that individuals are able to as well, but I would just be sort of a bit cautionary about some of the things that people might say about the space, simply because they don't really have sort of knowledge about how this space has evolved and changed over the last 10 years. I'd encourage people to reach out to us, we have I have a team of people that answer questions; there's no question that we haven't heard before. And importantly, help them understand whether the test is right for them. Because if someone has acute symptoms, oftentimes there's a more appropriate test. And we're more than happy to recommend sort of what we think is the right outcome for the patient.

Claudia von Boeselager 39:46
So where can people reach out and find out more about Prenuvo and what you're up to?

Andrew Lacy 39:53
Well, unlike most medical businesses, we have a phone number on our website that you can actually call and talk to a human, so That number is a three, three pre novo; if you're in the US, you can also chat with folks on that website itself. And we also have an email address that people respond to, usually very fast. So you may reach out through whichever modality is sort of your works best for you.

Claudia von Boeselager 40:20
Can you repeat the URL, and we'll link all of these in the show notes as well?

Andrew Lacy 40:24
It's Prenuvo which is p r e. N uvo.com.

Claudia von Boeselager 40:29
Do you have any final ask for Andrew, a recommendation, or any parting thoughts or messages for my audience today?

Andrew Lacy 40:36
The one message I would maybe leave the audience with is this question, what do we think our health system would look like in 20 years' time? Or what would we want it to look like if that health system was redefined around preventive health rather than reactive medicine? And I think that's, for me, such an interesting thought process because we spend 95% of our healthcare dollars on reactive healthcare. So a re-engineered and re-architected health system from the ground up may look very different from what it looks like today, it may well be half the size that it is today, it may well be that we don't need so many of the drugs that we have today, it may well be again, that sort of getting a health checkup is as easy as it is to drive your car into a shop to get you to know, 500 points check up on your car. And for me, I think that's really exciting. Because let's face it, those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s. I mean, we grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars, and this sort of like this promise of devices that could tell us instantly what was going on with their health and fix it as quickly. And I think that's the future that we're all trying to build. And it really feels like we're now at a point where the world is starting to be ready for these other solutions. And it's really exciting. It's very exciting.

Claudia von Boeselager 41:49
And one last question to that, how do we fast-track that to become a reality? What's your view,

Andrew Lacy 41:55
I think it is worth thinking hard about how to evaluate longevity medicine or long interventions because we have a health system that you know and a system of clinical research, which is very robust as it relates to incremental changes to healthcare but doesn't work so well. When you look to make transformational changes to healthcare. You'd be familiar, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with a clinical study that's going on right now around the use of metformin and filling every. I think that's a really interesting trial. But I think what's really interesting about that trial was just how long it took them to get the funding in place to do the trial in the first place. And we must ask ourselves the question, why? Why is it so much more difficult to do a trial of a generic drug that potentially might lead to us living long lives if we took it than it is to do a clinical to get funding to do a clinical trial for a cancer drug that might extend the life of a terminally ill cancer patient by a couple of months? And if we can answer that question, and if we can come out with a different way of encouraging funding and promoting fundamental research in the field of preventive health, I think that's how you'll excel and accelerate, you know, the world towards a future where preventive health is at the core of healthcare.

Claudia von Boeselager 43:24
Yeah, beautiful. And I think, you know, it's maybe even government's level, depending on the country, right, and just shifting the focus. Obviously, the lobby of the pharma industry is very strong, and there are billions and billions at stake, which makes it difficult, but as you said, as well, I think starting from the sort of micro-level of becoming the CEO of your own health, and focusing on that and realizing that you're investing in yourself, your life your future, by investing in preventative medicine and measures and lifestyle interventions, instead of waiting until it's too late. So a lovely conversation. Thank you so much, Andrew; such a pleasure to have you on today.

Andrew Lacy 44:00
Thanks, Claudia. Great to be here.